


worse things than this

by younglegends



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, F/F, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 17:42:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19468918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/younglegends/pseuds/younglegends
Summary: In the future the world catches fever. But the symptoms start earlier than that.Or: An idolverse apocalypse AU, and a love story.





	worse things than this

**Author's Note:**

> set in the nebulous future. wasn’t sure how to warn, but the body horror is very mild. some concepts lovingly inspired by annihilation (2018). i just have end-of-the-world disease and it’s incurable, sorry ♡

_ Billboard in Iowa says:  _  
_HELL IS REAL._   
_ Fine. Okay. There are worse things than this. _  
_ A death, for instance,  _  
_ of something you can’t touch. Only feel in your  _  
_ throat  _  
_ when you wake up in the morning  _  
_ and it’s gone. _

It worsens in stages, like any disease, like any grief. The lethargy lasts the longest, but that isn’t altogether unexpected at this point in their careers, coasting to the finish line on the rolling momentum they’ve accumulated over the years. Next comes the sleepwalking, which is more humourous than alarming; Yerim sends a video to the group chat of a blank-eyed Yeojin standing at the foot of her bed in the middle of the night, mumbling something about butterflies, and Yeojin gets ribbed about it for ages until Jungeun says _it’s happening to me too._ On the news they’re suggesting something in the water; something in the air. Wear your face masks and don’t drink from the tap.

“It’s bullshit,” Chaewon announces over dinner one night, aggressively drowning her rice in spoonfuls of kimchi stew. “Made up by the government to divert the blame elsewhere. What could be causing exhaustion and sleep disorders but the stresses of capitalism and climate change? Wake up, people!” 

“Wow, you’re so right,” Sooyoung says, nodding her head, then widens her eyes at the rest of them when Chaewon isn’t looking: _you hearing this shit?_

Jinsol snorts into her glass of water because she can’t keep a poker face to save her life. “Ugh, gross,” Jungeun says, and hands her a napkin. Under the table, a leg knocks into Hyunjin’s, but when she looks up, Heejin’s laughing into Jiwoo’s shoulder, a pink flush to her cheeks. 

“You guys suck,” Chaewon says, and if her skin’s a little paler than usual, none of them mention it.

It’s not all of them together. Yeojin, Yerim, and Hyejoo are wrapping up their subunit promotions; Haseul and Kahei are filming a travel vlog series, though Hyunjin’s lost track of their itinerary. They could be anywhere in the world right now. The fans want another full-group release, but they’re out of luck—next on the roster is Haseul, Jungeun, and Sooyoung’s comeback. Heejin’s slated for an upcoming drama role. Jinsol’s been invited to collab on a track with a Western artist. Jiwoo and Chaewon are going to the countryside as guests on a variety show. So they rotate, in and out and on.

Hyunjin is staying put. There are CFs, magazine photoshoots, radio interviews. There’s also something in the air, or in the water, but that feels distant, no more dangerous than the skin of Heejin’s bare ankle against her calf, the eye contact they hold as Hyunjin drains her glass, brief and dizzying. Then Jiwoo steals a piece of fatty beef from Heejin’s bowl, and the resultant clamor scatters the moment like light. No matter; Hyunjin can bide her time. After all, she sleeps like the dead.

After the initial decline follows a benign lull in which nothing seems to happen. Winter is set to give way to an early spring; already the winds are warming, the roads flooded with snowmelt. They ambush Jungeun in the kitchen one night with a red velvet cake and she makes a good show of surprise, squealing when Yerim smears frosting onto her forehead. “Make a wish,” Haseul says, filming for VLive. Jungeun obligingly raises a finger heart for the camera, then blows out the single candle. 

“What did you wish for?” Heejin asks, in the middle of tying the red ribbon from the cake box into Jungeun’s hair.

“It won’t come true if you _tell,_ ” Yeojin says, affronted. 

Jungeun just laughs, poking at Yeojin’s pouty cheeks. “It’s not like it’s a secret! I wished for health and prosperity for our members, of course.” She taps her chin thoughtfully. “And that we would all have the chance to pursue our happiness in life.”

“ _Bo_ -ring, unnie,” Yeojin says, and shrieks when Jungeun shoves a handful of cake down the back of her shirt. 

Most of the other members are away on schedules, though Jiwoo sends hearts through VLive and Jinsol posts a cross-eyed photo of Jungeun to their Twitter account. Celebrity gossip sites reupload it with headlines that read _LOONA’s Kim Lip shows hilarious charms outside sexy image_ and the nation professes their love and hate in equal measure. Hyunjin licks the icing off her lips. This is the calm before the storm. 

Then six months to the date Heejin’s contract is set to expire, Hyunjin opens the bathroom door one evening to find her in front of the mirror with her shirt hiked up, examining her chest. “Uh, am I interrupting something?” Hyunjin says, and Heejin turns to her with a frown. 

“Take a look,” Heejin says, and there’s a seriousness to her tone that quells all the jokes ready on Hyunjin’s tongue. She steps inside the bathroom, closing the door behind her, and looks. A birthmark-like stain peeks out from under the line of Heejin’s bra, curiously white as though the colour has been bleached from her skin by the sun. About the size and shape of a ginkgo leaf fanned out over her abdomen. 

“Did you bruise yourself during practice?” Hyunjin asks, and Heejin shakes her head, a furrow in her brow. 

“It doesn’t hurt,” she says. “It’s just... there.” 

Hyunjin reaches out her hand slowly, giving Heejin time to pull away. She doesn’t. Only lets Hyunjin place a palm against the knit of her ribs, slotting perfect into the hollow of her sternum. The pale blemish is cold under the heel of Hyunjin’s hand, but around it Heejin’s skin is warm, pinking under her touch. 

After years of living together hardly anything is left secret. They’ve seen each other in various states of undress, slept in the same beds, swam naked in salt baths. But this somehow manages to still feel thrilling. Something remains that they have yet to discover.

“You should be more careful,” Hyunjin says, though of what she isn’t sure. 

Under her palm, she can feel the slow, steady thump of Heejin’s heart. She retracts her hand, as though having found what she was looking for. 

It isn’t spring but summer that emerges from the ice, leaping out of the earth a fully-formed creature. The days are flourishing but in a way that’s complete overkill: flowers blooming and wilting within a day, bushes spilling over fences and sidewalks, grass growing up to the neck. Sunlight beats down like a pin speared through the body of an insect. The air is thick with pollen, and with something else besides; apples swelled three times their usual size litter the ground in their orchards, left rotting to their cores. _There’s an excess,_ says a farmer being interviewed on TV. _Of what? Of everything._

Within the company’s air-conditioned office, one of their managers is speaking to them very seriously. “You have to outgrow this all-or-none line of thinking,” she says. “You have to start thinking of the future, of the steps you must take to maintain your place in this world.” 

Hyunjin is looking out the window at the cherry trees. Their branches outstretched like arms, sagging to the ground under the weight of all they carry: handfuls upon handfuls of rosy pink blossoms, frothing like waves. 

Something pokes at Hyunjin’s wrist. She looks down. The point of a pen is pressed against her skin, nudging her. She lifts her gaze to Heejin, sitting beside her, who raises her eyebrows and mouths, _pay attention._

Hyunjin moves her arm away. The pen drags over her wrist, trailing a line of blue ink like a vein. 

_I am,_ she thinks, watching the pleased lilt of Heejin’s mouth.

“You have to realize the world is bigger than just yourselves,” their manager is saying. 

Five months left to Heejin’s contract renewal. Then Hyunjin. Then the rest of them, lined up like numbers, degrees rising on a thermometer. Nothing is eternal, Hyunjin knows. At least, nothing yet. 

Hyunjin’s gaze shifts back outside, at the cherry trees bleeding pink as the inside of a mouth. She wonders, where have I seen that colour before. 

The fans get what they wanted after all. A twelve-member music video is dropped mid-June, and the album includes all their various personal projects: covers, collaborations, Haseul’s self-composed rap that ends up trending on Naver. Everything they’ve got pending on the back burner all released at once, as though someone high up the corporate ladder realized the pot’s set to boil. 

When it’s out, the group listens to the album separately but together at the same time, crowded around the room with their earphones in. “Oh,” Jiwoo keeps bursting out at random points, as though determined to narrate the entire thing, “this is from that time Yerimmie ventured into EDM! And this is when Sooyoung unnie taught me how to play the guitar, remember? Remember?” Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes Chaewon nudges Hyejoo, and they snicker at some inside joke; sometimes there’s a murmur of appreciation, a burst of applause at a high note, a verse mouthed along and known by heart. Mostly they listen in silence. A reverent sort of ritual: this is what we made. 

Then the next track starts playing, and it’s a duet Hyunjin forgot she recorded with Heejin ages ago. Listening to the voices that were once theirs, a shiver creeps over Hyunjin, eerie like looking in the mirror and seeing a reflection she’s outgrown. She meets Heejin’s eyes; knows they’re listening to the same thing, that unlocked echo from their past. When the song ends Hyunjin feels lighter for it, as though a tangible thing she has lost. A cell split in two. Repeating itself separate from the source, like all music once it leaves the artist’s mouth and becomes echo without origin or end: infinite.

They’re given scripts to memorize for broadcast stations and variety programs, but they’re too good at the game at this point and give their answers before the interviewers even ask. _To show a more mature side of us. A sound our fans haven’t heard before. We hope it brings renewed passion to those who have been with us from the very beginning; that they remember the feeling of when they fell in love._ Sitting in the back, Hyunjin spaces out and makes up her own questions, ones she is only just beginning to consider the answers to: _Did you have a good run? Did you ever wish for more? Do you still?_

Now they’re attempting to film the impossible: a Tipsy Live with all twelve of them crammed around a table laden with half-eaten dishes and slow-roasting meat on the grill, the camera struggling to keep up with their line distributions. Yeojin keeps clanging the neck of her empty soju bottle with her spoon until Haseul physically confiscates it from her. Jungeun keeps insisting she’s still fully sober and then cuts herself off to belt her lines at the top of her lungs into the saltshaker like a microphone. Hyunjin lets herself laugh, peeling at the sticky label of her bottle, and only when Jinsol casually elbows her does she realize the open longing with which she’s been staring at Heejin all this time, the kind of hunger that runs gut-deep and turns the body inside out. She closes her mouth with an audible clack of teeth, though it’s lost in the smoke and commotion, Kahei’s voice running clear through it all to complete the song. Outside the rain is coming down hard enough to hurt, but here at this table there is cheering, and another round of drinking, and the bright wine-drunk gleam in Heejin’s gaze looking right back at her. 

If there was ever something you wanted, they’re saying on the news. If there was ever a time.

One night Hyunjin wakes up to a prickling feeling, like something has passed her by in her sleep, and finds Heejin standing by her bed in her pajamas. “What is it,” Hyunjin says, and Heejin doesn’t respond. Sleepwalking, Hyunjin thinks, then reevaluates the term: she doesn’t look asleep at all. Her eyes are wide open. Hyunjin wonders what it is she sees. Then Heejin is turning away, and, mindful not to wake the other members, Hyunjin silently gets up out of bed to follow her, down the hall and into the kitchen. A glass of water, she predicts, or a snack, but Heejin moves trancelike to the window instead.

It’s barely four AM and the sun is rising. But that isn’t even the unusual part. That would be the mushroom cloud hanging ominously over the city, brilliant blue and still continuing to expand. Then Hyunjin looks closer and realizes the cloud is not a cloud, not even a column of smoke, but a swarm made up of a million butterflies, all clustered together in flight, wings aglow in the amber light of dawn.

“Oh,” Hyunjin says. 

Heejin presses a palm to the glass. Watches with eyes glazed and distant. 

“Where are they going?” Hyunjin asks.

Heejin doesn’t respond. Her face is bared in yearning. Hyunjin thinks she understands.

“Come on,” Hyunjin says. “Let’s go back to bed.” 

Hyunjin lets her crawl into bed with her. It’s too hot for blankets, so they lie uncovered on their sides facing each other, Heejin still lost in reverie, Hyunjin waiting for her to come back. She watches it happen, the slow slide of milky lenses over Heejin’s eyes, changing hues. Indigo and silver and shades Hyunjin doesn’t have the names for. Velvet curtains moving over a stage. Eventually, Heejin blinks drowsily, lashes slightly wet.

“Hyunjin?” she whispers.

“I’m here,” Hyunjin says.

“I had the strangest dream,” Heejin says, blinking again. “I don’t remember how I got here.” 

“You were sleepwalking,” Hyunjin says. It isn’t quite true, but she’ll know what she means.

“Do you think...” Heejin hesitates. Shifts closer, their noses almost touching, and whispers: “Do you think we’re going to die?” 

It’s the closest they’ve come to saying it out loud. In the hush of the hour, though, no sirens sound; nothing breaks. It feels allowed. 

“I don’t think we’re dying,” Hyunjin says. “I think we’re just becoming something else.”

Another shift; a precious inch. Their noses brush. Their hair tangling over their heads like haloes. When Heejin blinks, it tickles the skin under Hyunjin’s eye. This face she knows more intimately than her own: the moles delicately arranged; the crease of her eyelid; the whorl of her ear. They watch each other, unhurried and patient. Looking without shame. Only anticipation of an inevitability. 

In the morning, bent before the bathroom mirror, Hyunjin finds the slightest streak of white in her hair. 

Of course when shit eventually goes down, it happens at Inkigayo. 

They’ve got pre-recording in the morning, though it may as well be afternoon; the sun never sets anymore. It isn’t a unique phenomenon—countries all over the world are reporting the same thing, no matter what hemisphere they’re in. Hyunjin’s seen the photos, suns burning bright in the sky, for all intents and purposes the same one as their own. The heat is still bearable—or maybe their skin is getting thicker—but sunblock sales go off the charts and anti-ultraviolet visors are all the rage these days. Jinsol jokes that they should incorporate them into their stage outfits. It doesn’t go over well with management, and they get saddled with neon miniskirts and go-go boots instead. 

It isn’t the only styling change. Yeojin’s eyelashes are losing their colour, but with the right amount of mascara and care you can hardly tell. Heejin gets concealer daubed extensively on her collarbone, where the slightest edge of white is beginning to peek out from the neckline of her shirt. Fans comment on Jungeun’s killing gaze, but the pearl grey of her eyes have nothing to do with contacts. Still, you can’t complain about their performances. Not a single step out of place. Moving in unison like they’re parts of a single body: Haseul the head, Heejin the face, Hyejoo the hand. Hyunjin something deeper than that, under the skin, any of the immeasurable vital organs that impel the muscles and stir the blood. The pulse, perhaps. 

In their waiting room everyone thrums with a restless energy, the way they used to whenever they were up for first place. Yerim sings her lines soft under her breath; Jiwoo flits from member to member across the room, loud and nervous. Jungeun makes faces at her and Sooyoung swats her away, but finally Heejin indulges her, letting her squish their cheeks together and win at their clapping games. Meanwhile Haseul taps her thumb against her knee, a nervous tick from years before, before she debuted. Hyunjin wonders what it is she’s counting down to now.

Onstage everything looks different, so the same as usual. When they sing it is as though one voice made multiple, and it belongs to all of them. There is joy in this, Hyunjin thinks; for a fleeting instant she wishes for the performance to last forever, and for a fleeting instant it does. Then a hand flutters onto her waist, just briefly during the choreography transitioning from chorus to bridge, and Hyunjin looks up, startled, in time to catch Heejin’s pointed nod at the audience as she whirls past. Huh. The fans, clutching the guard rails, waving the occasional lightstick. Did they always have _that_ crazed of an expression on their faces? Some of them are even foaming at the mouth.

Which is when the guard rail collapses and Hyunjin sees it, through the stage lights: the terrible fire of devotion in their eyes. 

The music’s still playing, but the room’s a riot. Kahei herding them to the emergency exits, Yeojin beating back the fans with a microphone stand, security getting swallowed up by the crush. Hyunjin latches onto the first familiar thing she sees—the bottle blond of Jinsol’s hair—and follows it all the way through the halls and out, blinking in the sudden sunshine. The world outside is no better off, cars crashing in the parking lot, screech of metal and brakes, burning tar. Everything aglow as though the lines are blurring in soft focus; Hyunjin has to squint her eyes to recognize things for what they are. A signpost or a stranger. There is Sooyoung, helping a woman fallen on the street; there are Chaewon and Hyejoo, who look like they’re holding hands, or are so close they may as well be. There’s Jungeun, or at least the sound of her, letting out something that could be a shriek or a laugh as she zigzags through the stopped cars. And there—the approaching crowd, swell of water in a rising wave. Hyunjin can understand their hunger, in this air that tastes sweet as honey. This cruel craving for more. 

Beside her, a movement.

“What do we do?” Heejin shouts over the uproar. Her stage makeup is smeared. Glitter under her eyes. No matter—Hyunjin would know her anywhere, even here.

Moments of clarity have come to Hyunjin throughout her life. A merciless decision broadcast on national TV. A promise made to fans on the stage of their first win. A day like any other in the practice room, bowing her head to the trainee who said “It’s good to meet you,” and then smiled like she meant it.

“We run,” Hyunjin says, and grabs her hand. 

Later, they’ll say it was love that did it, threw everything into ceaseless ruin. Later, they’ll ask: Where were you when the world caught fever? But the answer’s in the trees, in the earth, the ball of fire in the sky: everywhere. We were everywhere. We were.

_ HELL IS REAL.  _  
_ Fine. Okay. We already knew that. Of course  _  
_ we knew that.  _  
_ We even sort of hoped for it.  _

[x](https://kerumie.tumblr.com/post/137999238773/sometimestuesday-to-clarify-i-wrote-this)

**Author's Note:**

> i’m on twitter [@dearfutures](http://twitter.com/dearfutures) & cc [@wishbone](http://curiouscat.me/wishbone)!


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